Who is david malouf

I was born in , so the Second World War came along when I was five, but what we were surrounded by was the returnees from the First War. In the First World War, Australia lost 62, men, when the population was not quite three million. And people who had been to that war were in and out of your house all the time.

I still lived in a world where men who were on the dole were endlessly knocking on the back door and asking if you had work for them or a meal or something. And all of those men talked to little boys, and told them stories of the war. So for a boy growing up in Australia, not only the Second but the First World War too was enormously close. What I got from all those stories became my experience as well. In writing about anything from about to the time when I was born, I have an accurate feeling for what that period was like, what it felt like, what the texture of it was, from what I caught as a child from the stories I listened to in what was still largely an oral society.

I can remember the moment of hearing that news; I can see myself sitting on our little bit of lawn and trying to come to terms with it. That was the moment in my life, I know, when I understood for the first time that there might be circumstances under which my parents could not protect me.

It was very different from the way I experienced the First World War, because that was already a story. This was something else, a story we did not yet know the end of, and which might end badly. It was all muddle and nightly news and rumor. Brisbane, where I lived, was a vast encampment, because it was the jumping-off point for all the men fighting in the Pacific.

Brisbane had a population then of about ,, but at any point, for three years, from to , another , soldiers were stationed in the city. So you were involved in the whole business of being somewhere behind a very distant, yet not so distant, front line. I found that a tremendously interesting part of that book, the actual aftermath.

It was right for that book. But that makes a very strange dislocation in family life. Is that right? I have to go through the process myself. And then you realize after moving into your writing, into your body of work, that your writing is really a way of talking to the tribe, of opening up to them what you think of as your shared experience. To that extent, I am writing first for Australians.

I think of the way in which, as a young reader, I was enormously drawn into the world of Faulkner, for example. Faulkner creates a world so vivid and particular that you can step in as a reader and make it immediately your own.

You spoke of feeling utterly at home in France. DM Well, I was very interested in what Robert Pepin, my translator, had done with The Great World , because I knew French well enough to feel my way into his translation, and it seemed that he was trying to find a place for the book in French writing. The translation in that way was a real creation. CT But it was in a tradition with which you were deeply familiar. DM Oh yes. Look, French and Russian are the two literatures, outside English of course, that I have always felt closest to.

Russian because it too came late on the scene, and its writers had to create a new literature from an unfamiliar landscape. To that extent Australia, like America, has learned a lot from the Russians. Everybody else at some time or other provoked his ire. It was in , at the Adelaide Festival concert version of a scene from Voss , for which I had written the libretto.

Patrick had had an opening of one of his plays the night before, and the governor was there. We had all been caught out—all of us good republicans—by the playing of God Save the Queen. So Patrick had caught me standing up for God Save the Queen. He attacked me at the door of the concert hall. You were standing for the Queen! So we did not see one another for a bit. But a few months later, he read Fly Away Peter and wrote to me. All forgiven. He was wonderfully generous in that way.

But there were things he simply did not forgive. Producing work that he thought was unworthy of your talent. Running after success or praise. Leaving your wife or partner. He could be absolutely unforgiving about things like that. How you thought of it or how you made it so perfect. It does look now like a sort of miracle. Much more so than Johnno. I wrote it in Sydney at the end of And then about two weeks later, on a long walk up to the shops from where I was living at Cremorne Point, I wrote a long passage in my head.

Attempts to bring the Child within the compass of human civilization will strangely backfire, as the roles are reversed and it is finally Ovid who takes lessons in the ways of nature. As a wild boy in perfect tune with the natural world, the Child commands a mimetic "language" of sounds and cries that allows him to commune with the creatures peopling the bush. In his own attempts to imitate animal sounds, Ovid, too, becomes aware that the creatures "will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness.

And after them, the plants…" However, he only achieves perfect wholeness when settling "deep into the earth," at the end of a life-long quest, when his body dissolves into the landscape in a way that seems finally de-creative. After the post- lyrical experiments of An Imaginary Life , Malouf's work has tended to gesture more and more towards the quality of epic, as the author rehearsed a succession of major episodes in Australian history.

In novel after novel, he strived to imaginatively assess the extent to which these events, which have in the meantime acquired the status of myth, actually served to shape up a sense of national consciousness.

Throughout, though, this positive celebratory historian's approach is pursued alongside the usual morbid interest in the more entropic dimensions of human experience. The Great World is like its predecessor, Harland's Half Acre , in that it also ranges over several decades of Australian life, so that, taken together, these two books probe Australians' experience of the First World War again , the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Holocaust, the post-war mining and property boom, and finally the financial crash of Also, these books include a variety of representative characters and types from all walks of life, so that they can be said to aspire to the quality of national realist epics, indeed just like Tolstoy's War and Peace with which The Great World has been compared.

The first of these superfi-cial clichs of national character is the myth of the "digger," as Australian soldiers in World War I were commonly nicknamed. In Fly Away Peter , the myth with its connotations of self-indulgent pride in physical prowess and undisciplined "mateyness" is pitted against the horrific reality of large-scale massacres in the trenches of Flanders.

The image is further redressed and expanded in The Great World in which one of the main characters, precisely called Digger, is endowed with an encyclopaedic memory allowing him to record "the little sacraments of daily existence," those that constitute "our other history, the one that goes on under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet. The point is clearly that the writer approaches national identity not as fixed, a matter of given characteristics, but as an ongoing process of inclusion and change, susceptible to being revisited and transformed.

A similar approach is perceptible in Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek , in which Malouf challenges traditional representations of the settler and of the bushranger, respectively. Remembering Babylon recreates the lives of the Scottish settlers of a small Queensland township in the middle of the nineteenth century, and so reveals a continuing interest in revisiting history. The villagers' peacefulness is disturbed by the intrusion of Gemmy, a young British castaway who was rescued and raised by the Aborigines.

Gemmy's appearance compels the white settlers to address the fact of native presence in new, unbiased ways; in this respect, he emerges as a catalyst of cultural change, which is in keeping with his status as a "forerunner" of the time in the future when Australian culture can be considered as equitably hybrid or "geminate.

One way of reconciling Malouf's constructive post-colonial endeavour with his more de-creative leanings would consist in stating that the death of his protagonists on Australian soil amounts to claiming that territory as an authentic source of cultural roots. In a sense, then, his writing can be seen to conceal colonialist attitudes, or at least a spirit of competition with the natives for possession of the continent as a locus of valid experience. But perhaps this must be qualified, with the recognition that Malouf is acutely aware of the political and epistemological limitations imposed upon him by his own subject matter.

For example, in Remembering Babylon , Aboriginal culture is only envisioned through the authorising prism of Gemmy's hybrid consciousness. If it were not for this kind of subterfuge, indigenous experience would of course remain strictly out of bounds for the white writer, who has therefore no other option than to keep exploring his own side of the culture.

In the last analysis, it is probably fair to say that Malouf gives literary expression to the profound dilemmas and traumas lying at the very foundation of Australian settler culture; or that, conversely, this kind of issue entered the domain of literature thanks to the consummate skills of a writer who will remain known as one of the most beautiful stylists in the English language.

Novels Johnno. An Imaginary Life. Fly Away Peter. London, Chatto and Windus, She and Cassie, the family maid, took turns in reading the Victorian novels she had read as a girl in England to the children; books such as Jane Eyre and David Copperfield - the source of the young Malouf's Christian name.

He first left Australia when he "was 23 and spent 10 years teaching in England before returning to a job at Sydney University. On becoming a full time writer, he also began dividing his time between home and Tuscany. But recognition means more to Malouf than money. Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription.

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